Wine (software)
Windows compatibility software / From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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Wine[lower-alpha 1] is a free and open-source compatibility layer to allow application software and computer games developed for Microsoft Windows to run on Unix-like operating systems. Developers can compile Windows applications against WineLib to help port them to Unix-like systems. Wine is predominantly written using black-box testing reverse-engineering, to avoid copyright issues. No code emulation or virtualization occurs. Wine is primarily developed for Linux and macOS.
Original author(s) | Bob Amstadt, Eric Youngdale |
---|---|
Developer(s) | Wine authors[1] (1,755) |
Initial release | 4 July 1993; 30 years ago (1993-07-04) |
Stable release | |
Repository | gitlab |
Written in | C |
Operating system | |
Platform | IA-32, x86-64, ARM |
Available in | Multilingual |
Type | Compatibility layer |
License | LGPL-2.1-or-later[5][6] |
Website | winehq.org |
In a 2007 survey by desktoplinux.com of 38,500 Linux desktop users, 31.5% of respondents reported using Wine to run Windows applications.[8] This plurality was larger than all x86 virtualization programs combined, and larger than the 27.9% who reported not running Windows applications.[9]